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Tag: trust

Categories
Environment Health Learning

How to weigh evidence

  • Post author By Tracy Durnell
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Watched Biomedical Scientist Answers New Pseudoscience Questions | Tech Support | WIRED from YouTube

Biomedical scientist Dr. Andrea Love returns to WIRED to answer a new slate of the internet’s burning questions about pseudosciences, health fads, and false …

I lean towards trusting studies, but also recognize I’m not qualified to evaluate their quality. Coming from an environmental background, I also have skepticism around a lack of evidence of harm, which in the environmental field is often merely indicative of a lack of research, period. I don’t have time to stay up on the best available science myself, but the news is incentivized towards sensationalizing results, especially if they find any possible evidence of harm. In the environmental field, I pay more credence to anecdotal evidence than I used to. The material sciences / chemical industry has a bad track record of lying to the public and downplaying safety concerns — the incentives are against us. All too often, our bodies are the externalities.

Alternative medicine is easy for me to set aside because so much of it is wacky, but food and material sciences are harder for me to tell what’s legit. I’m also aware of the discrepancies in medical research for women especially, and the tendency for women’s health concerns to be invalidated.

With all these conflicting considerations, how to decide where I land?

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Categories
Featured Learning Political Commentary Reflection

Stories help us find truth, but there’s a difference between fact and fiction

Stories provide a scaffold for understanding

When I read non-fiction, I’m less interested in learning facts than gaining understanding (though sometimes facts support the understanding). I want to build a mental scaffold to hook future facts and related concepts onto. I want to build a story.

In his XOXO talk, Ed Yong speaks about how this desire to synthesize the bigger picture influenced his Pulitzer-winning COVID coverage. There was no single protagonist in any of his pieces, but he set a rule for himself that half of the people he talked to for any piece should be new, so that he included a wide range of perspectives. He also discusses how shifting from a social to a medicalized view on public health made the cultural narrative of the pandemic one of man against virus, with vaccines as our saviors… a narrative which melted down when the vaccines primarily prevented severe illness rather than much protection against infection. It turns out that the broader, social perspective of public health — everything beyond vaccine-as-weapon — was the bigger barrier.

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Categories
Future Building

Resilience builds on trust, fascism on fear

Against Fearing Home Cooks by Devin Kate Pope

The U.S. food system disconnects people from their food and each other. When a home kitchen invokes fear, doesn’t that say more about what we think of our neighbors than any truth about cleanliness?

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Public Spaces, Private Lives by Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick

[P]eople are afraid to take the bus because of “crime” and “safety” when murder and crime are dropping — but fears of personal safety continue to climb. The brain infection that Trump implanted into popular culture … has infected everyone, making us all feel that someone is going to shoot us and steal all of your money when you leave your house, which is why walking is now seen as too scary an activity.

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Categories
Cool Places Writing

An improvisational walking newsletter

Liked TOKIO TŌKYŌ TOKYO³ by Craig Mod (mailbot2000.craigmod.com)

Joy was so close, just there, right there, for me to take and inhale like a grapefruit vape pen the size of a sequoia, if only I paid a hundred bucks or so. Space Mountain was to be ridden, parades to be watched, love — the purest love, vast capital-infused love — suffused the air. Dixieland jazz seemed to waft from garbage cans and light fixtures. No one was sad except the screaming kids, they were sad. They were screaming. And they were everywhere. Nix those kids and you’d have utopia.

Craig Mod’s back at it again with another pop-up newsletter — he really takes advantage of the format of newslettering. Of time-constrained projects where the newsletter is intertwined explicitly, inexorably, with the project, of the freedom of writing to only to a small specific audience, of the creative permission his membership program gives him to do audacious things like walk across Tokyo for a week or visit a bunch of remote Japanese jazz cafes. The improvisational nature of these emails makes sense for a writer who likes jazz: he doesn’t know what he’ll write about any given day but the structure of the paired physical experience shapes the output like the chord progression of a song shapes a musical solo.

I admire that he’s figured out a creative format that works for him, that key to the project is providing a framework that prompts creation without knowing exactly what that work will turn into. He provides himself constraints — limiting the time commitment, choosing the place, preselecting the format — while also opening up avenues of exploration — granting himself the time to create, immersing himself in Place, choosing format but waiting to find the subject. He builds himself intrinsically-motivated external structures — a powerful ability when so many creatives come to rely on external structures defined by others.

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Categories
Society

The value of trust

  • Post author By Tracy Durnell
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On trust and money by Frank Brown Cloud

When money replaced trust, we gained efficiency. People could conduct economic exchanges with others whom they had never met, about whom they knew nothing, and not worry that they would be taken advantage of.

But trust wasn’t simply ensuring that someone who needed a hammer could get one. As a medium for exchange, trust was interwoven with both access and restraint. A trust-based system of exchange allows you to get a hammer when you need it, and prevents you from taking all the hammers when you don’t need them.

Money demands no such restraint.

Trust is less efficient than money. But trust did more than enable exchange. Trust held communities together.

And yet, cryptocurrency gurus argue that our world needs even less trust. In “The Price of Crypto,” Trevor Jackson writes that:

[Cryptocurrency “Ethereum” founder] Buterin argues that one of the most valuable properties of his institutional design is “trustlessness.”

Yike 😬

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“One reason I left Twitter long ago is that I noticed that it was a kind of machine for destroying trust. It binds you to the like-minded but cuts you from those with whom you have even modest disagreements.”

— Ezra Klein (via Alan Jacobs)

Categories
Culture Learning

How we decide what information matters

The Death of Canon and the Remaking of the World by Sam Valenti IV

The idea of canon implies that the awareness of certain things is passed down as a norm, in that we talk about certain works of art as rites of passage in our education.

You need a wide spread of adoption or awareness to be canon cause if no one knows what you are talking about, there’s no center.

So how will art be plucked out of the ether and chosen as canon? I don’t think monetary value will create it, as records seem to fly by every week. Similar to the Mona Lisa, canon will emerge from hiccups in time, some intentional, some algorithmic, and some simply bizarre… The visual metaphor I see when I think of when I imagine canon making is just two decks of cards being shuffled; one hand being algorithmic and one hand driven by fan demand or user-generated content, and of course, the whims of chance in between, or what some may say is spiritual or luck.

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30 Signs You Are Living in an Information Crap-pocalypse by Ted Gioia

The gold standard is trust, not information. A single trustworthy voice is worth more than ten thousand bot-written articles.

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every so often im struck by the memory of one of my college professors getting very angry with our class (art history of pompeii 250) because when she excitedly detailed the ingenious roman invention of heated floors in bathhouses via hearths in small crawlspaces, we asked who was tending the fires. she said “oh, slaves i suppose. but that isnt the point”. and we said that it actually very much was the point.

[…]

There are a lot of people who are still under the floors. all these beautiful, convenient, brilliant innovations of modern society (think fast fashion, chatgpt, uber, doordash) are still powered by people working in inhumane, untenable conditions.

— aggie (the rat truth)

Categories
Future Building Places

What’s the role of libraries?

  • Post author By Tracy Durnell
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Bookmarked Seattle’s Public Libraries Chart a New Strategic Direction by Ray Dubicki (theurbanist.org)

The Houston group produced a couple possible outcomes, including a preferred one. The Taking a Stand alternative sees libraries taking a stand for community values, but facing increased competition from fragmented and very biased competitors. The Trusted Third Space alternative leans on technology to offer a lot of services, but without some social services and at a pretty hefty expense requiring new funding. The preferred scenario is called Ecosystem Anchor where the library becomes a green hub for community organizations with other parts of city government operating social services with the library as liaison.

Chart showing possible futures for the library over the near and middle term
Scenarios planning for Seattle Public Libraries, including a baseline of collapse, two interstitial scenarios, and a preferred 10-year outcome. (University of Houston Foresight)

I find these options really interesting because each have compelling aspects, but given funding restraints, not all are possible. Trusted Third Space would probably be my vote; our communities are lacking spaces — the programming will probably handle itself if there are gathering spaces people can use. Providing space over programming really requires trusting the community by giving them what they need: a free, safe place to meet. Under this goal, the spending priority would be offering many locations, open as many hours as possible. I see this option in tandem with the Ecosystem Anchor alternative, offering a safe place where trusted partner community organizations can offer services and programs at the library.

Categories
Future Building Society

Trust people to know what they need

Replied to Unconditional cash transfers reduce homelessness (PNAS)

In a cluster-randomized controlled trial, we address a core cause of homelessness—lack of money—by providing a one-time unconditional cash transfer of CAD$7,500 to each of 50 individuals experiencing homelessness, with another 65 as controls in Vancouver, BC. Exploratory analyses showed that over 1 y, cash recipients spent fewer days homeless, increased savings and spending with no increase in temptation goods spending, and generated societal net savings of $777 per recipient via reduced time in shelters.

And treat people with dignity.

A lump sum payment seems way more useful than rationing it out over months — more likely to be spent on a big item than needing to save up. First and last month’s rent is outrageous in expensive places like Vancouver. People act the same way about getting their tax refund, even though they could just pay less taxes all year round.

This study seems very promising. More than 90% of the people in the study wanted a job — and iirc getting people off the street and into stable housing makes it much easier to find a job. I want to see more studies like this in the US, with actual money on the table, none of this $500 bs.

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Categories
Personal Growth

Doing less to be more

  • Post author By Tracy Durnell
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Quoted The Magic of Doing Less by Katie Hawkins-Gaar (My Sweet Dumb Brain)

But I don’t want to do less just for the sake of doing less. I want to do less to give myself space to become more.

There’s a gap between the goal and the living it; it requires patience and trust in yourself to take the space for growth, knowing it doesn’t happen on demand and may not take the form you expect.

Or, in that space you might learn that you are enough already 😉 And doing less gives you the breathing room to be yourself and let go of the mental framework making you feel you must do or be more. To reevaluate your wants and let go of the ones you’ve absorbed through cultural diffusion that reflected your needs in a world of more, but may no longer in a world of less.

 

See also: Explore Mode

Create space for yourself

Categories
Entrepreneurship Personal Growth

Overcoming fear and internalized norms to create a new routine

Replied to When your inbox owns you by Jenni Gritters (Mindset Mastery)

Luis would need to tolerate the anxiety of not addressing his email during those few hours, so we came up with some tactics: Listening to calming music, going on a walk, and repeating to himself: *I have the power to choose my routine*.

I could see his brain rewiring in real time: He no longer believed that his clients hired him because he was always available. He was starting to see that it was safe to wait a bit before responding. It was even safe, in some cases, to not respond to emails at all.

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